For most of last winter, the stoop outside Big Charlie's Saloon at 11th and McKean held flowers, handwritten notes, and the kind of quiet foot traffic that shows up when a neighborhood loses someone it didn't expect to lose. Paul Staico had run the bar for more than 40 years, turning a modest South Philly corner into a place national sports writers wrote about for its Kansas City Chiefs shrine, a room regulars called Arrowhead East in a city that bleeds Eagles green. Staico died suddenly on November 30, 2025, at 59. The bar closed within weeks. By February it was listed for sale, and on August 31 the Philadelphia Inquirer reported an agreement of sale had been reached.
That's roughly nine months from a death to a signed deal on the building. A few blocks away, the city and the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation have spent close to eight years turning Washington Avenue's eastern stretch into something safer to walk and bike, at a project cost of $9.5 million, and the work is only now reaching substantial completion this month. One corner found a buyer almost overnight. The street underneath it took most of a decade. Walk the finished bike lane this September and you're standing on infrastructure that was designed for a version of Washington Avenue that started disappearing before the concrete even cured.
Nine Months at 11th and McKean
The math on Big Charlie's is worth sitting with because it moved so fast relative to everything else on this stretch of South Philly. Staico's death in late November triggered an abrupt closure that the bar's operators attributed to a mix of factors, including a gas shutoff from PGW that one owner described as the final blow. The company posted to Instagram that the closing wasn't so much a goodbye as a pause, but there was no reopening. By February, Hoodline and the Kansas City Business Journal were both reporting the property was on the market, with the bar dark and the estate weighing options.
What happened next is the part that tells you something about who's actually reshaping this corridor. The buyers aren't a South Philly institution reopening under a new name. Drew DiTomo, a chef and partner at the Kensington gastropub Meetinghouse, and Tim Jacobsen, who owns the Old City vintage shop Stickball, are the ones with the agreement of sale. Their plan is to convert the space into a bar called Sweets, and by their own account the NFL memorabilia isn't part of the concept. If the deal goes through, it will bring a four-decade run of Arrowhead East to a close.
That's not a story about Washington Avenue reinventing itself through some coordinated redevelopment plan. It's a story about a single vacancy, created by circumstance, with buyers reaching an agreement to take it on. Nothing about the timeline was planned eight years in advance. It was a death, a gas shutoff, a listing, and a deal, compressed into less than a year.
The Storefronts That Didn't Wait Either
Big Charlie's isn't the only corner on this stretch that's flipped fast. Chef Chad Durkin already had two connected spots fronting Washington Avenue in the Graduate Hospital and Point Breeze area, Porcos Porchetteria, serving Italian-style whole-roasted pork sandwiches he modeled on a specific style he encountered in Ariccia, and Small Oven Pastry Shop next door. Last fall he added a third: Breezy's Deli & Market, on the corner of Washington and 23rd, built as a chef-run take on a corner store. Durkin has said the goal is to be the go-to market as Washington Avenue continues its run as a thriving business district, which is a bet on the corridor's trajectory made by someone who already owns three storefronts on it.
A few blocks south in Point Breeze, the same pattern shows up on corners that have nothing to do with the Connector project directly. Schmaltz, a Jewish-inspired breakfast and lunch cafe from Jeremy Asch and Abby Armstrong with chef Sam Chertock, opened this year at 1300 S. 18th Street, serving latkes and egg sandwiches on house-baked English muffins with no bagels on the menu. Around the corner at 19th and Mifflin, Sam Ahern turned a former barbershop into Lillian's, a cocktail bar and bistro where the kitchen rotates among guest chefs on a residency model, so the menu itself is built to keep changing. Neither of these openings waited for permission from a master plan. Each opened on its own timeline.
None of this turnover required Washington Avenue to finish being rebuilt first. It happened in parallel, on its own clock, driven by individual leases and individual deaths rather than by any public timeline.
An Eight-Year Plan Finishes This Month
The public side of the story moves at a completely different pace. The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation first unveiled concepts for reworking Washington Avenue back in 2018, built around years of community meetings about how to make the road safer and less of a barrier between South Philly and the river. Construction didn't actually start until April 2025. The project was originally expected to wrap by spring 2026, then pushed to August, and as of this month DRWC says the work is reaching substantial completion, with final inspections continuing into fall.
The scope, once it's finished, includes:
- A raised, curb-separated multi-use path on the south side of Washington Avenue, running from 4th Street to Columbus Boulevard
- A parking-protected bike lane carrying westbound cyclists on the north side
- More than 60 new trees along with benches, bike racks, and trash cans
- Four new median islands and widened curb bumpouts at intersections to shorten pedestrian crossings
- Removal of the slip lanes near Jefferson Square Park and under I-95, with the Jefferson Square Park slip lane converted into a plaza that DRWC's Joe Forkin described to The Philadelphia Inquirer as a kind of front porch for the park
The total cost lands at $9.5 million, funded through city capital, a Commonwealth grant, and DRWC support. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, DRWC's Lizzie Woods said I-95 and Columbus Boulevard function as both physical and psychological barriers, cutting neighborhoods off from a waterfront that's only a few blocks away. Not everyone on the block is thrilled with the tradeoffs. Residents posting in local Facebook groups have flagged the loss of on-street parking near Jefferson Square Park and at the new bumpout corners as a real cost of the redesign, even as most seem to agree the wider sidewalks and shorter crossings solve a problem that had been obvious for years.
Eight years from concept to completion is not unusual for a public infrastructure project funded by a mix of city and state money. It's just slow compared to everything happening on the storefronts along the same route.
What the Mismatch Actually Means for Anyone Walking This Block
Put the two timelines side by side and the interesting part isn't that the street changed or that the businesses changed. It's that they changed on completely different clocks, and neither one was built to account for the other. The Connector's planners in 2018 were designing crossings and bike lanes for a Washington Avenue that still had Big Charlie's Saloon serving Chiefs fans at 11th and McKean, that hadn't yet seen Durkin open a third storefront, that had no idea a former barbershop at 19th and Mifflin would become a cocktail bar with a rotating kitchen. By the time the trees are in the ground and the median islands are poured, the commercial identity of the corridor has already moved past the version the project was designed around.
That's not a knock on the Connector. Safer crossings and protected bike lanes matter regardless of who's running the bar on the corner. But it's worth naming plainly for anyone who lives along this stretch and has watched both processes unfold at once: the public work that reshapes how you move through the neighborhood runs on a completely different schedule than the private decisions that reshape what you find when you get there. One took eight years and a construction contract. The other took a death, a gas shutoff, and two operators from Kensington and Old City deciding a South Philly corner bar was worth buying.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks both, that gap is the actual story of Washington Avenue in 2026. The sidewalk finally caught up. The corner it's in front of had already moved on.
If you own property on or near this corridor and you're thinking through what a changing commercial identity means for your own plans, whether that's timing a sale, weighing a purchase, or just understanding how a block's character shifts underneath a long-running public project, that's the kind of question Next Chapter Real Estate Planners is built to work through with you. The conversation starts with your goals, not a listing.
